


Contact High

by OneOfThoseThings



Series: Interspecies Compatibility [5]
Category: Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: Can be read as platonic but I personally ship TF out of these two, Crack, F/M, Fluff, Fluff without Plot, Humor, Telepathic Transference Treated as a Fun and Handy Mood Elevator, Telepathy, no beta we die like men
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-02-22
Updated: 2020-02-22
Packaged: 2021-02-28 09:35:40
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,583
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22848040
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/OneOfThoseThings/pseuds/OneOfThoseThings
Summary: Donna wins a bet and drags the Doctor to Disneyworld. His level of enthusiasm leaves something to be desired. Donna proposes an unorthodox solution.(Part of the Interspecies Compatibility series, but can easily be read on its own. Or skipped entirely. Bit of a diversion, really. Much like Disneyworld!)
Relationships: Tenth Doctor & Donna Noble
Series: Interspecies Compatibility [5]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1637608
Comments: 8
Kudos: 123





	Contact High

**Author's Note:**

> Contact High (ala Wikipedia): A psychological phenomenon that occurs in otherwise sober people and animals who come into contact with someone who is under the influence

Donna cheated at cards. The Doctor knew she cheated at cards. Because he _also_ cheated at cards. Somehow their card games always devolved into just seeing who could cheat the most. It made tracking scores a bit complicated, but Donna was, as usual, loudly confident that she had won the last round. 

The TARDIS, intolerably, seemed to agree. 

And thus, for no good reason, the Doctor found himself standing in a gaudy shop in the middle of Disneyworld circa 2008 watching his companion gleefully pick through novelty mouse ears. 

“I’m having the best time,” Donna said, grinning like she just couldn’t stop.

“Entire universe on offer and this is what makes you happy? You humans have the strangest priorities,” the Doctor grumbled. 

Donna somehow managed to smile even wider. “It’s fun!” 

“We could go to an actual space mountain, you know. Or― there’s this one planet that’s just one gigantic amusement park. We’re talking roller coasters the size of mountain ranges.” 

Donna laughed, pawing through a the mouse ears like she was panning for gold. “Didn’t go on my first holiday abroad to a mountain range full of roller coasters, did I?” She pulled him down by the tie and plonked a headband with ears on him. They seemed to be the standard fuzzy mouse ears with green antennae inexplicably added to the middle. 

She grinned like her face might split open. “OK, _this_ is my new favorite thing. When we get back I’m starting a list of all my favorite things just to put this at the top.” She put her own mouse ears on with a flourish. Hers came with a pink and purple glittery crown. 

The Doctor crossed his arms, refusing to fiddle with the nonsensical novelty ears. “Anything else, your majesty?”

She laughed that high whooping laugh that she normally tried not to let out in public. “A camera! That’s what I need!” She spun around, scanning the walls. 

“Yeah, that was definitely not part of the deal.” He caught her elbow and spun her right back toward the register. “Here we go,” he bustled her along. 

At the last moment, just as he was handing the credit chip to the cashier, she snagged a disposable camera off a display he hadn’t noticed. “This too!” she said, grinning at the teenager. 

The cashier smiled back and scanned it before the Doctor could stop him. 

“Molto bene!” Donna crowed, and immediately snapped a shot of his expression. “Oh this is just,” she put her fingers to her lips and made an exaggerated kissing gesture. She looked around, “Do you think they have photo albums?” 

“All right, here we go,” he pulled her toward the door. 

She went along, fiddling with the camera with her free hand. 

Three frozen bananas later, the Doctor had nearly managed to forget he was wearing ridiculous ears and was pretending not to notice Donna snapping photos of him in arbitrary locations doing arbitrary things like eating said bananas. Every new ridiculously kitschy thing seemed to ratchet her into an even higher level of delirious enthusiasm. 

“I am in _the best_ mood,” she announced for the fourth time.

He chuckled, “I noticed.”

Donna huffed. “You’ve picked a fine day to develop a sense of decorum!” She spotted something over his shoulder and was already dragging him in that direction when something else caught her eye and she whirled on him. “Wait― I have an idea!” 

He laughed again. “How can you even tell?” She seemed even more scattered than usual. 

Donna somehow grinned even wider. “ _That’s_ my idea!” She crowded into his space. “Want to see if you can join me in this frankly fantastic mood?” 

He tried and failed to follow that particular leap in logic. “What?” 

Donna tapped her temples, quirking her eyebrows. 

He blinked at her. “What?! Right here?!?” 

Right on cue, a small child dressed like a hotdog nearly ran into his leg. 

Donna shrugged, not even flagging. “No one’ll think anything of it. We’ll just do your bit, obviously. I’m not traumatizing a bunch of kids on the teacups.”

“Hang on,” he said, finally starting to catch up. “I’m not an empath. You can’t just pass your mood over to me.” 

Donna was already shaking her head. “No, you said― Remember the other day when you fell asleep after and woke up all catty because ‘Time Lords don’t need sleep and hanging out with lazy humans must be making you lazy?’” She pitched her voice deeper, sounding exactly nothing like him. 

“That’s not what―“

She barreled ahead, the way she tended to when she was leading up to some grand insight. “Well, I hadn’t said anything, but I was exhausted the day before. I think you caught a bit of that while you were rooting around in my head doing whatever it is you do in there.”

The Doctor remembered that, actually. He’d barely had a chance to move his hands away from her temples before he passed out. Donna was already dead to the world by then, looking so… happy to be asleep…

Donna waited all of two heartsbeats and when he didn’t protest further, she pulled him over to some sort of disproportionate astronaut figurine, flashing the psychic paper and heading down the priority queue. 

Three minutes and fourteen seconds later, they were sitting in a two-seater pod with bright green and purple laser blasters affixed to the front. 

The Doctor eyed the toy guns distastefully. “This is... Just when I think you lot can't get any more offensive, you pull this out of your back pocket.” 

“Oh, calm down, it’s just a ride. Don’t worry about that― the point is it’s a two-seater.” She scooted in closer. “What do you say? I’ll keep up appearances and youuu,” she dragged out the vowels, sing-song, “see if you can join me in this fantastic mood.” 

She pulled his closest arm around her shoulders, and tugged his other hand over so that she was sitting sort of half in front of him with his hands on either side of her head. “How’s this?” 

He blinked at the back of her head. “Are you sure this is―“

She turned enough to flash a grin in profile. “C’mon, Spaceman! It’ll be fun!” She bumped her shoulder into his chest. "I promise to only shoot the fake laser at fake targets and leave the fake aliens out of it." 

He felt like he should protest more, but his hands were already reaching for her contact points. 

~*~

Donna’s mind lit up like a pinball machine running on a power surge. Her thoughts scattered, tripping across each other and sparking at the intersections. New, strange colors stood out. Bright neon yellow splashed into aquamarine, turning impossible shades of evergreen and mint. 

Sensations, memories and abstract concepts snapped together and apart, randomly forming new connections and then disengaging, spinning off like metallic fibres caught in a malfunctioning magnetic field. 

The currents caught and pulled on his own sense of self, threading through and arcing back hap-hazardously and in dizzying, frenetic loops and knots. 

He realized the tugging sensation wasn’t purely mental. Distantly, he felt Donna shifting against him in increasing urgency. “Doctor,” her voice sounded far away and very close. “Doc-tor!”

He let himself fall through, blinking his eyes open.

~*~

“Oh no, he’s fine,” Donna was saying. “Just a little sugar crash― you know how men are. Can’t take them anywhere.” 

He dropped his hands to his sides, fingers tingling, and she immediately hopped up, pulling him along. “Thanks again, girls!” she called over her shoulder, waving. 

He followed her out, trying not to stumble, feeling bubbly and untethered. They made their way to a nearby bench. 

“Sorry about that,” she said, not sounding particularly sorry at all. “We’d already been through four times. I told those lovely young women at the front that you were just having a quick kip, but their supervisor was going to come around soon and we all know how supervisors are. Well, you might not, but the rest of us mere mortals have to put up with them.” 

The Doctor stared at her, trying to make sense of any of that. There was a strange ringing in his ears, like his own brain was trying to tell him something very exciting and couldn’t quite get the words out in order. 

Donna looked him over curiously. “Did it work? Your pupils are huge.”

He realized his respiratory bypass had kicked in and forced himself to take a breath. “Feels… _fantastic_.” His thoughts seemed to be fluttering around a bit more than usual, making it hard to focus. But in the most _brilliant_ way. “Like drinking pure liquid delirium.” 

Donna whooped. “Pretty much the same then.” She pulled him up, still laughing. “Let’s take this mood to Space Mountain. That last ride gave me an idea― I want to see how many times in a row we can talk the operators into letting us stay on.” She whirled around on him. “Oooh, let’s buy elaborate disguises! Add an element of mystery!”

“Oh yes!” he crowed. “From now on, we should always have disguises. I need a beard.”

“One wizard beard, coming up,” Donna agreed, pushing into a random shop. “How do you feel about tights?”

“Love tights. Love any noun that’s its own verb, me.” 

“See now _this_ is the enthusiasm I’m looking for! We should do this all the time!” 

With his thoughts buzzing happily away, it was hard not to agree. 


End file.
